Tens of billions of dollars have been spent in the past 60 years, entire careers have been invested, but the ability to produce a commercially viable nuclear fusion reactor remains undemonstrated.

After beating our heads against the wall for so long, you might ask: Why keep trying?

Because on paper, fusion has the potential to save the planet.

Imagine a world powered by a cheap, safe, clean, virtually limitless, sustainable fuel source such as water. If fuel and energy are cheap and available to all nations, that reduces global political tensions. If our energy comes from a clean-burning fuel source, that reduces air pollution. All that would be good, right?

When Coblentz said "star," he meant that quite literally. Fusion is what keeps stars, including our own sun, burning bright.

Oversimplified, of course, here's how fusion is supposed to work:

You take two gases called deuterium and tritium and you heat them under pressure to at least 100 million degrees Celsius. That's 180 million degrees Fahrenheit. These substances will get so hot that they change from gas to plasma. Then they fuse together -- releasing a burst of additional heat. That burst is called a fusion reaction.

The heat boils water into steam, which drives a turbine and generates electricity that powers your neighborhood.

Here's the really important thing: To be commercially viable, you have to create more energy than the original energy you used to heat the fuel.

And there's the rub: We haven't been able to figure that part out.

The ITER project in Cadarache, France, aims to do just that.

Five years after construction began, activity is ramping up to a higher level. Several 33-foot-tall, 86-ton drain tanks have recently arrived from the United States. Workers have been busy gathering components to build giant electromagnets that Coblentz called the "largest superconductor procurement in the history of the planet."

The mood at Caderache is hopeful, Coblentz said. "There's a very palpable sense that at last we're entering this phase where we're seeing physical change," he said. "We're seeing the progress of the project."

"The real question is can the organization work in an internationally harmonized way and be reliable and stick to the schedule. .. I'm confident that it really is going to happen. We're going to be surprising a lot of the skeptics."

ITER recently cut the ribbon on a nearly 200-foot-tall Assembly Building, one of the first massive structures at the site. Inside, workers will piece together large reactor components before they're inserted into the main facility that houses something called a tokamak.

The ITER Tokamak will be nearly 30 metres tall, and weigh 23,000 tons. (Click to enlarge)

A tokamak is a doughnut-shaped vacuum chamber surrounded by electromagnets. It's designed to hold the plasma in place with the help of a magnetic field. If the plasma can be held in place long enough, the heat and pressure will create a fusion reaction.

Here's how it works: You take a pellet filled with deuterium and tritium gas and place it inside a gold plated cylinder. Then you shoot it with intense laser light. The light heats the inner walls of the cylinder, creating a superhot plasma that showers the pellet with soft X-rays. The X-rays heat the outer surface of the pellet, causing it to implode. The implosion compresses and ignites the plasma and burns the fuel, causing a fusion reaction.

Experts say science has made a lot of progress recently and for some, confidence is high.

"For $20 billion in cash, I could build you a working reactor," Professor Steven Cowley, CEO of the UK Atomic Energy Authority, told Popular Mechanics. "It would be big, and maybe not very reliable, but 25 years ago we didn't even know if we'd be able to make fusion work. Now, the only question is whether we'll be able to make it affordable."

Nonetheless, it's unlikely the big push for fusion will disappear altogether, as long as it promises to solve the world's energy needs for the next millennium.

"Sure. It would solve that. There's no question," Coblentz said. "We just have to demonstrate it, and then replicate it on a scale that will actually be practical."